The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power ran two ads in this newspaper recently with lots of small print under the headline, “Notice of City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) Public Hearing.”

Maybe we all had the same thought when we saw it: “NOW, what?”

It’s not another rate hike, yet. It’s a public notice about the pending creation of new Groundwater Sustainability Agencies, one to govern groundwater in an area of the San Fernando Valley, and one for the groundwater under Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Culver City. The formation of these new agencies will be discussed at the Board of Commissioners meeting on Tuesday, May 2 at 10 a.m. in room 1555-H of the DWP’s headquarters, located at 111 N. Hope Street in Los Angeles, in case you want to go.

In case you don’t want to go, here’s what it’s about. In 2014, Governor Jerry Brown signed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which for the first time authorized statewide regulation of pumping of water from wells. Local governments, water agencies and other interested parties have until July 1 to set up a local entity to enforce the state’s new groundwater-pumping regulations, or else the State Water Resources Control Board will intervene and govern local wells.

There are over 500 identified groundwater basins and sub-basins in California. So far, the Department of Water Resources has received 172 notices of potential Groundwater Sustainability Agencies to manage 277 of them. There’s a lot of overlap. Underground lakes don’t know or care that there are city, county, or district boundaries above them.

Just in case California was at risk of developing a lawsuit deficiency, this should take care of it.

The 2014 law was opposed by agricultural interests in the Central Valley and elsewhere who argued that the way to prevent overpumping of groundwater is to manage surface water allocations appropriately, instead of cutting off water to farms and sending it out to the ocean to tickle fish.

Add it to the list of crazy water policies in California. Recently the LADWP put out a news release warning that the snowmelt from the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains could cause flooding that damages the dust mitigation equipment we’ve paid for at Owens Lake.

Since 2000, LADWP customers have paid over a billion dollars for a system that pours more than 20 billion gallons per year of drinking water on a dry lake bed to hold down dust. And now it’s at risk of water damage.

I don’t even want to think about it.

There have been serious proposals to secure an adequate water supply for Californians, which would be a nice change from scaring people into measuring the drops of water they allot to their houseplants.

In the 1940s and again in the 1990s, plans were studied for a water pipeline that would tap into the abundant Columbia River on Oregon’s northern border. The consensus was that the “United Western Plan,” as it was called in 1948, was certainly possible, though expensive and politically difficult.

Is it crazy? Once, people thought desalination of ocean water was crazy, then that it could never get past the objections of environmentalists. Today, former Senator Barbara Boxer, a card-carrying environmentalist, is a lobbyist for a proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach.

Eight desalination plants are currently proposed in California. It’s certainly less crazy than trying to set up hundreds of government agencies to ration underground water, and probably less expensive if you count salaries and lawsuits.

Speaking of crazy and salaries and lawsuits, the L.A. mayor’s new budget has a deficit of almost a quarter of a billion dollars, and that deficit could double if the city loses a lawsuit over the annual transfer of money from the DWP to the city treasury. Every year, the DWP gives the city 8 percent of the gross revenue from the electricity side, about a quarter of a billion dollars of supposedly surplus revenue. Of course, it’s not surplus revenue, because your rates are going up. It’s probably an illegal tax.

That’s the argument in case number BC577028, Patrick Eck v. City of Los Angeles. The court has set a May 4 deadline for a “motion for preliminary approval of class action settlement.”

If settlement talks fail or the settlement isn’t approved, the case could go to trial, and ratepayers might win. Would we get a refund of all the money we overpaid?

Don’t bet on it. That would be crazy.

Susan Shelley is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Reach her at Susan@SusanShelley.com.